These United Hosts
Civics 101
In this heartfelt and insightful episode of Civics 101, hosts Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice reveal their upcoming marriage while exploring the historical and civic significance
Key takeaways
- Marriage is not just a personal union but also a civic institution shaped by history, culture, and evolving social norms.
- Many modern relationship struggles stem from inherited habits and societal myths rather than individual failure.
Main topics
- The historical evolution of marriage
- Marriage as a civic and democratic institution
Notable quotes
"We are all dealing with institutions, with myths, with habits, earworms that get in the way of our beginning to realize what we need to change." – Stephanie Kuntz
Conclusion
By reflecting on the history of marriage and its parallels to democracy, Hannah and Nick affirm that lasting
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) Hey, everyone. It's Nick Capodice here. If you have found yourself asking, can the president really do that? Then you got to check out You Might Be Right. It is the chart-topping civics podcast produced by Howard H. Baker Jr. School of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee. Named after Howard Baker's guiding principle to, quote, always remember the other fellow might be right, end quote. You Might Be Right aims to inspire the next generation of leaders in government, public policy, and public service by filling a critical gap in today's media environment and offering balanced perspectives without the shouting matches found on cable news. Each episode, former Tennessee governors from both sides of the aisle, Phil Bresden and Bill Haslam, tackle timely policy conversations with luminaries like Al Gore, Judy Woodruff, and more. Their new season just launched, and they are tackling such big questions as, is there too much money in political campaigns? And should a president be able to take control of a state's National Guard to restore order, even if a governor resists? Hear balanced perspectives without the shouting matches found on cable news. Follow You Might Be Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And make sure to tell them Civics 101 sent you. Speaker 2 (1:21) Do you think people are going to be surprised? Or do you think people are going to be like, oh, I knew it. Speaker 4 (1:28) What'd you take this from? I Speaker 1 (1:31) don't think you need to know. Speaker 4 (1:33) All right, Speaker 2 (1:33) here we go. Here we go. I mean, we want the clerk's office. Speaker 4 (1:45) City clerk, that's where you can get a business license. You can register to vote. Hi Speaker 2 (1:51) there. We're here to get a marriage license. Speaker 3 (1:56) So so the process is that I then take this over to my little workstation and I go into the database I put you guys in and then I make a working copy And I'll bring it over to you guys and you get to mark it up as much as you see Speaker 2 (2:09) going into a city hall Always. And it's like Rebecca was saying, it makes you feel better to see people, talk to people, and be reminded that there is something that's functioning. Right? People, I think, can convince themselves that everything is a mess and everything is too frustrating and nothing is working. Speaker 3 (2:29) There you go. Is Speaker 1 (2:30) that it? Speaker 3 (2:31) This is your official license. This is... It's good to go. Yours. Yeah. I know. Speaker 4 (2:44) I'm very emotional about this. Speaker 3 (2:47) As you should be, it's a big deal. It is. Speaker 2 (2:55) Tale as old as time. When two people love the principles of democracy and civil rights very, very much, sometimes they decide to get married. Speaker 4 (3:07) Even if when they first met. Speaker 2 (3:09) Okay. Yeah. Okay. So can I tell people? I feel like, I mean, we're just like letting it all out. Let it all hang out. So when Nick first joined NHPR. This Speaker 4 (3:21) was in 2019. This was in 2019. I had just come from New York to work at the station. Speaker 2 (3:27) Yeah. Speaker 4 (3:28) And. Hannah and I didn't get along tremendously well. Speaker 2 (3:31) Yeah, I mean, and I kind of think this is part of it. And this is the truth. When Nick first joined the station as the education outreach producer for NHPR, I was like, who is this? Steamroller Mr. Ideas, man. Coming in here, going to join Civics 101 and shake it all up. Speaker 4 (3:51) But we did. We started making episodes that sounded different from Civics 101 as it existed before. Speaker 2 (3:57) Yeah. No, that's true. That's true. But even so, for a while, I was like, I am a professional journalist over here. Do you want to see my master's degree? Speaker 4 (4:07) But it turned out, it turned out, like we got in the studio and it turned out. We were pretty good at it. Like, we worked well together. We Speaker 2 (4:15) worked really, really well together. And actually, Nick, as I was thinking about how to tell the people that their two favorite Civics 101 hosts are indeed getting married, I actually had to stop myself because what I... Was thinking to myself, I was going to say on the show essentially amounts to my wedding vows. Well, Speaker 4 (4:37) you don't want to give those away. No, Speaker 2 (4:39) you get it. You like save something. Something in the tank. Keep Speaker 4 (4:42) a Speaker 2 (4:42) little something to yourself. All right. So suffice it to say, we work together. Everyone knows that. And we work together. Yeah. Right. Right. And that is what it is all about, I think. And as we have been getting ready to enter into this very. personal endeavor of marriage. You and I have been thinking about how marriage is also a civic institution. We have, it's true, we're civics hosts, it's just what we do. And so we thought this might be a good opportunity to get some historical perspective and maybe even a little advice on the nature of marriage and the nature of union and working together and democracy. So for this episode, I spoke with someone who has been researching and writing about marriage and family for many years. She is also the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. And that person is the inimitable Stephanie Kuntz. I Speaker 4 (5:46) love Stephanie Kuntz. I interviewed her for an episode. Years ago, like eight years ago. Speaker 2 (5:51) Yeah, I know. Which is why I was so excited when I saw that Stephanie had written a new book. Speaker 4 (5:57) Yes. So everyone, Hannah and I have talked about this new book a lot, like every night. It really did something to us. Speaker 2 (6:04) It really did. We have had hours of conversation, right, about what I learned while I was reading this book. And I think a lot of that has to do with the power of learning the history behind something. Okay, so this book is called For Better and For Worse, The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. Speaker 4 (6:26) Challenging future. Well, we got ahead of us, McCarthy. Speaker 2 (6:35) As I was reading this book, repeatedly, I had to put it down. I had to rush downstairs and I had to say to Nick, my coworker and fiance, I just learned this about the history of marriage. I just learned this. I learned this. And we had so many moments wherein one of us would say, that's comforting or wow, that's really good to know. And the same experience was repeated with family and friends as I would talk about this book. And I would love to know if that is a common reaction that you have or if I just have the most self-selecting group of people in my life. Speaker 1 (7:10) Well, it's the reaction I was going for. So I don't know, but I hope so. I hope to give people stuff that would make them rethink some of their assumptions and perhaps realize that we have more leeway than we realize to make things better. Speaker 2 (7:26) So that's really interesting to me, the idea that we have more leeway. You present this book as this broad, long history of marriage as an institution, you know, both social and economic and I suppose political. Why present it in that way to give people that sense of leeway? Well, Speaker 1 (7:46) we are going through a kind of crisis that is greatly misunderstood with people thinking that. People don't value marriage anymore, which is not at all true. People beginning to give up on the other sex, hetero pessimism. And it strikes me that we do have indeed some huge challenges. But if we can put those challenges in historical and sociological perspective, maybe we can stop beating up on our partners or ourselves. for what we do wrong. If we can recognize that we are all dealing with institutions, with myths, with habits, earworms, I call them in the book, that get in the way of our beginning to realize what we need to change in order to get the more egalitarian, satisfying marriages we want, then I think that it doesn't make it easier to change, but it makes it less stressful and less tension-inducing for the partners that are trying to change. Speaker 2 (8:44) So this part, that we are all dealing with institutions, myths, habits, and earworms that get in our way, Nick, I think about this all the time when it comes to this country and this democracy, okay? Because I'm always thinking about the disillusionment, the frustration, the conflict. How much of that is about what is real? actually happening and how much of that is due to American culture and habits and myths and the stuff that we have been told is real versus what is actually real. So Speaker 4 (9:22) are you saying that marriage is America, essentially? I Speaker 2 (9:26) think what I am saying is that a union is a union. You got people coming together and engaging in a lifelong project. I mean, ideally, right? Like, Speaker 4 (9:37) ideally, Speaker 2 (9:38) this country keeps going. Ideally, marriage is forever, you know, in an ideal situation wherein people want egalitarianism. They want equality and partnership and working toward the same goal. And it isn't easy, but it is made a lot harder by the stuff that we believe is true that just maybe is not. Speaker 2 (10:06) What have you identified over the course of your career as the most common earworms that affect people in a marriage? There Speaker 1 (10:14) are so many of them, but let's start with the idea that men find it very difficult to do emotion work, that women have always done the kind of emotional heavy lifting. They're the ones who recognize when things are going wrong in a relationship and take steps to overcome it, smooth things over. But, you know, this is a myth. Emotion work, if you go back to the 16th century and 17th century, used to be organized by class rather than gender. The lower classes did it to the upper classes and men did it just as much as women. In fact, arguably more because of the social hierarchies. Speaker 2 (10:48) OK, so looking back into the long history of marriage, we're getting to the origins of a lot of hetero habits here. So just, you know, bear with us. And trust me, Stephanie has a lot to say about gender myths as well. But Nick, she said organized by class. class rather than gender. Does that make sense